Snapchat admits one of its employees fell victim to an email scam that impersonated its CEO

Snapchat
has admitted in a blog post that one of its employees fell
victim to an email scam that revealed payroll information about
employees to people outside of the company.

The post says that "a number of our employees have now had their
identity compromised" due to the phishing scam.

A phishing scam is where an email impersonates someone else in an
attempt to get information about a company or login information
to a system.

In this case, Snapchat says the malicious email claimed to come
from CEO Evan Spiegel, and someone in Snapchat's payroll
department fell for it.

Snapchat makes it clear in its blog post that no information
about users was handed out — it was only data about people inside
the company. The company says that it reported the scam to the
FBI and offered affected employees two years of free
identity-theft insurance and monitoring.

This isn't the first time that tech companies have been hit by a
phishing scam. Business
Insider reported in August that many London startups had been
targeted by phishing emails that impersonated company CEOs.